Waking from a dream, but this time the plot and details don’t matter. This time it’s about where it led me, in the first coffee stage of the day.

Early on I scraped the bottom more than once. Sleeping on couches and in parks, all that.

When I, um, bootstrapped up out of that, I developed a theory. This theory stated that the First Thing was to obtain a Situation, by which I meant: a job, and a rental not too far from it, and a way of getting between them.

Grabbing hold of a situation is not a one-and-done kind of thing. There will always be a job that pays more or requires less hours for the same compensation. There will always be a better apartment, and maybe it will be on a major bus line. For instance.

So for many years I bounced around from job to job and place to place trying to perfect the mix. Sometimes the gambles paid off and other times not. I put a lot of effort into getting a college degree, in part so that my attractiveness to better employers would grow. Again the results were mixed–I did fall into the student loan trap, and eventually the trappers got serious, and that … is off-topic.

In the meantime, the Second Thing was to find, in the context of the present situation, a Girl. Mainly I thought of this in terms of pleasure. What it really was, was a search for Attachment in the midst of my ongoing quest for Autonomy.

When it worked (and with modest pride I can note that it usually did somehow), I was starting to claw up the rungs of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Eventually I got a second degree, but that changed nothing. But becoming a qualified driver of 18-wheelers fundamentally did. My debt (leaving the unplayable pile of student loans aside) was wiped out and there was almost no need to pay rent at all. Finally a surplus of cash piled up, and that was amazing.

I used it to get the first van, and the first computer, and the first mobile situation, and wander. What I found was the town I wanted to live in.

But the money ran out and the perfect little town was not an immediately viable place to construct a new situation. I moved to Albuquerque instead, and found a good one, beating back 41 other competitors to win my golden refuge, back in the arms of a schooly mater. Pushing forty, my economic life was finally trending upward.

Let’s leave the bio there for now.

***

There’s an old saw in anthropology. It says: Startling but true! The average hunter-gatherer from back in the before times spent 20 hours a week at “work”, providing for him/herself the basic physiological necessities of life!

How that ever got calculated is a mystery to me–it doesn’t make much sense really. But … because it is a data point that supports many of the ideas I hold dear, I generally believe it anyway. Plus, I would argue, the old Way is not hierarchical. As a member of a small tribe, a lot of the higher needs were fully integrated into the process of obtaining sustenance. Taking down an animal in a hunt means food of course, but also grants both a feeling of accomplishment and prestige–maybe even something akin to spiritual fulfillment.

Contrast this with today where the “job” is, or is supposed to be, a wholly separate and compartmentalized thing-unto-itself.

Grabbing oneself a situation today means accepting alienation as a fact of life.

You don’t have a home, unless and until you have a disconnected alien job to pay the rent for it. There’s quite a lot of overlap between the homeless and the jobless, and even good compassionate citizens can feel some mix of scorn and pity for the “less fortunate”. Shrugging and sighing and spitting out some post-civilized truthiness about Ya Don’t Work, Ya Don’t Eat.

At some very basic level, this is a seriously fucked up system.

And by system I don’t mean only capitalism, but ‘civilization’ itself.

Your better anarchists have noted that Property Is Theft.

I propose a corollary which states that Civilization Is Slavery.

The project I’m undertaking might look like it’s about pickup trucks and nomadics and film making and profit.

It’s really an experiment in whether de-civilizing oneself is desirable. Or even, to any meaningful extent, possible.